Between Layoffs and Tougher Interviews, Tech Workers Are Stressed Out

February 22, 2024 gear Leave a comment 17 Views

There was a time when getting a job at Google or Amazon would be a ticket to long-term stability and success. Many of the big tech companies seemed immune to large-scale layoffs, and as their profits skyrocketed, those cushy jobs became highly sought after. But economic headwinds, and the looming influence of AI, are leading to some tumultuous changes in the tech industry.

In just the first seven weeks of this year, Amazon, Google, Discord, Duolingo, Cisco, Instacart, and dozens of others all made deep staffing cuts. It all adds up to tens of thousands of jobs lost across the industry, and the cuts aren't slowing down. It doesn't help that interviewing for tech jobs is getting harder too, with employers asking for more and more work or rigorous testing before making a hire.

This week, WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave joins us to talk about whether the layoffs will cool off, and why right now is a daunting time to be looking for a tech job.

Show Notes

Read Paresh’s story about how Google has been cutting down on its acquisitions lately. Read Amanda Hoover on recent tech industry layoffs, and her story about the TikTok layoff videos folks have been posting. Read Lauren’s story about how tech job interviews are getting even more demanding. And of course, follow all of WIRED’s coverage of AI and how it affects people’s livelihoods.

Recommendations

Paresh recommends making an effort to connect and collaborate with your disabled colleagues. Lauren recommends the documentary The Eternal Memory. Mike recommends listening to Ty Segall’s new album Three Bells and watching his live show.

Paresh Dave can be found on social media @peard33. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

How to Listen

You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:

If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here's the RSS feed.

Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: Lauren?

Lauren Goode: Mike?

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Michael Calore: If you could have any job in the tech industry, what do you think it would be?

Lauren Goode: I think I would like to be an internal critic. I don't know if anyone would hire me to do this, but I would just like to be the person who says, “You are not designing this for a real human being,” or “You need to treat both your users and your staff better.”

Michael Calore: The gadfly?

Lauren Goode: Yeah, the ombudsman. Is that how you say that?

Michael Calore: The ombudsman?

Lauren Goode: Ombudsman. What would you be?

Michael Calore: I'd want to be the barista on one of the swanky campuses, just so I could chat with people all day and make them happy by giving them something that they want.

Lauren Goode: I would watch that sitcom. Was there a character like that in HBO's Silicon Valley? I don't think so.

Michael Calore: I don't think so.

Lauren Goode: Oversight. Is there security in that job?

Michael Calore: I don't know. The tech industry has been suffering a lot of layoffs lately. I don't know if there's any job security in the tech industry anymore.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, we should talk about this.

Michael Calore: Absolutely. Let's do it.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]

Michael Calore: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore. I am WIRED's director of consumer tech and culture.

Lauren Goode: And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: We're also joined this week by WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave, visiting us from the business desk. Hello, Paresh.

Paresh Dave: Hello.

Michael Calore: Welcome back to the show.

Paresh Dave: Thank you for having me.

Michael Calore: Of course.

Lauren Goode: I think the first time we had Paresh on, it took us what? 11 months, as he pointed out, to bring him into the studio. And now there's no stopping it.

Paresh Dave: It's because I became your ombudsman.

Lauren Goode: That's right. Welcome back, ombudsman.

Michael Calore: Today we are talking about tech jobs. In the first seven weeks of 2024, tech companies, big and small, have been laying off significant numbers of workers. Amazon, Google, Discord, Duolingo, Cisco, Instacart, dozens of others, they all cut staff in January and February. It all adds up to tens of thousands of jobs lost across the industry. Companies often conduct layoffs at the very end or the very beginning of the year, so these workforce reductions are not particularly out of step with historical patterns. But the cuts that started last month are not slowing down, and that feels off, so we're going to talk about why now.

In the second half of the show, we're going to talk about what it's like to interview for a tech job and how that typically strange experience is getting even stranger for job candidates. But first, let's talk about the layoffs. So Paresh, I want to start with you. You've been covering this along with our colleague Amanda Hoover on the business desk at WIRED. I want you to tell us, is there any end in sight to the tech layoffs?

Paresh Dave: No, absolutely not. Google has said that they're going to continue sort of cuts throughout this year. I think we can expect the same from Amazon and Meta and these other companies that are realizing that they're, like you said, generating just as much sales as before, they're doing great, profits are sort of skyrocketing, and they're still able to do this while they're sort of trimming staff. And so they're realizing that they can get rid of projects that aren't as interesting, they can roll things out slower. And then I'm sure you'd want to talk about the AI and how it's making workers supposedly more productive.

Lauren Goode: Can we just refer to the AI as Steve, like Rusty Foster does in Today in Tabs? Let's just give it a persona. Before we get to AI though, there's been this narrative that part of this is because during the pandemic, tech companies hired, their position might be that they overhired, and so this is a backlash to that. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Paresh Dave: Yeah. The pandemic made everyone think that we'd spend the rest of our lives online and never go out into the real world again and never drop our phones and stop looking at them. Of course, that didn't prove true. We've all returned to our normal lives. We are spending a lot of time online, but maybe not as much as these tech executives were thinking. But that's only part of it. I mean, the other issue is that money was cheap during the pandemic. They were able to borrow money at low interest rates. Now, interest rates have gone up, companies can't do that as easily. Investors are demanding dividends. Meta just this month announced that it would be paying a dividend on its shares to investors for the first time. That's profits that could have been reinvested in the company and gone towards hiring, but these companies are having to make different sort of decisions in this environment where money isn't cheap anymore.

Michael Calore: Which company is cutting the deepest?

Paresh Dave: Well, I would say irrespective of how big the cuts are, I think the company where the cuts have been most destructive is Google. Google, until last year, hadn't gone through any sort of mass layoff before. And it's completely disrupted this culture where people thought that there was this safety, this sort of luxury of being in a tech job where they could be there for the rest of their lives if they really wanted. And Google over the past year plus has been cutting people who've been there for 15 years, 20 years, and it's really shocked people to their core. I think that sort of flowed to other companies that are a little bit younger like Meta and Amazon, that also felt just as sort of cushy. You could sort of stay there as long as you were doing a pretty decent job. And that's distinct from let's say Microsoft, where they've been doing these cuts that are performance-based, or IBM that have been doing these cuts that are performance-based annually. And people were used to workers coming and going. That just wasn't the case at a place like Google or Meta.

Lauren Goode: We should talk about Steve, the AI. I'm wondering if AI is a part of this story because tech companies are using AI to do the jobs or make jobs more efficient that humans used to do, or if it's because they just feel perhaps on an R&D level, they need to invest much more in those departments and shift focus away from other departments.

Paresh Dave: I think it's both of those. And I think it's a third thing, which is AI and this sort of generative AI boom that we've seen over the last year is sort of leading to companies throwing stuff against the wall and wanting to move quicker and pivot. So it's that too.

On the first part of it, yes, I mean, I spoke recently with a CEO of a large software company where they said that their coders were able to write 30 percent more software code over the past year due to GitHub Copilot, which is this coding assistant that uses generative AI to help software engineers finish their code. I mean, that seems like a huge number. And that productivity doesn't necessarily mean layoffs, it just means that they're able to build more tools, and hopefully that will lead to more sales. And then if it leads to more sales, then they can go into more hiring. But they're not letting go of those people, because they want to keep building. On the second part, I think you've seen how companies have been trying to put these resources into developing Gemini, this new chatbot, or recently renamed chatbot from Google. Meta has been putting things towards development of Llama and these other generative AI models. And so they've cut back from things like Google Assistant, right?

Lauren Goode: Mm-hmm.

Michael Calore: Which is odd considering that Assistant was, for Google anyway, one of the first real injections of AI into our world, this thing you could talk to and ask questions, and it was a disembodied computer.

Lauren Goode: That's so 2010s.

Michael Calore: It is.

Paresh Dave: But part of what they're cutting are the features that they realized users were not using that much, right?

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Mm-hmm.

Paresh Dave: And they're being I guess more judicious in a way that they probably should have been earlier in saying, “Well, Google's whole thing and Meta's whole thing is a thing that needs to have hundreds of millions, a billion users to be worthwhile, for the revenue to matter to them.” And they had let things maybe go on a little too long. But then, yeah, like I was saying, the third piece to this is just that because they're so unsure about where the winds will blow and what users will be interested in and what their competitors are doing, things are just moving so fast that they want to kind of be lean enough to shift people around. And so you're seeing layers of management disappear at these companies, which is interesting. And you're seeing maybe more contractors or contractors become even more fungible than they were already, which is kind of awful for someone in that position.

Lauren Goode: Have labor unions or the attempts at building labor unions within these big companies had any effect on this?

Paresh Dave: Certainly we've seen the Alphabet Workers Union—which is hundreds of members, maybe a little bit over a thousand now, which is a small drop in the bucket of Alphabets, 180,000 employees around the world—certainly raise concerns about these layoffs, demand more transparency, demand more warnings, better severance, making sure it doesn't disproportionately affect minorities or people of color or women. But workers don't have power right now. I mean, there are just so many laid-off workers out there in the tech industry in places like Silicon Valley that workers just don't have a lot of power.

Michael Calore: I think it's interesting that for a hot minute, there was a trend on social media of people live-streaming or making TikTok videos of their layoff experience. Did you see any of those?

Paresh Dave: Yeah, you say it was a trend. I think it's very much still a trend. Although I was looking on TikTok last night, it's hard to tell which ones are real or not. I feel like people are maybe staging some of these things for the views. But yeah, I mean it's really taken the stigma out of layoffs in a way that is probably healthy for society, maybe not healthy in the fact that we're going through so many job cuts. But these videos where people are literally showing the Zoom call where they're being laid off or where they're talking about how they felt after finding out or what the circumstances were, like one person posted about finding out while they were on vacation, I think it's creating this camaraderie, this community. “You're not alone. It may not have anything to do with your performance or whether you're a good worker, a good coder. It can be totally random. It could be an algorithm choosing you. It could be a manager 10 levels above you who doesn't know you, just choosing a name out of hat, whatever it is.”

And I think that's good. It seems healthy that we can sort of be more at peace and not think our lives are ending because we got laid off.

Lauren Goode: So it's a way for some of these laid-off workers to find community through the absurdity of TikTok?

Michael Calore: The human faces.

Paresh Dave: Or they're just trying to generate likes and get some money out of that.

Lauren Goode: Hashtag #influencers.

Michael Calore: All right, let's take a quick break and we'll come right back.

[Break]

Michael Calore: By now, you've probably heard plenty of stories about what the job interview process is like for big tech jobs, candidates being asked to solve complex logic problems or do silly brain-teasers or write code on the spot. For a long time, these stories were pretty amusing, especially because you knew that on the other side of it lay a very high-paying engineering job. Tech workers are pampered, or they were anyway. But the mass layoffs that started in 2022 have now led to a glut of talent on the market. Jobs are harder to come by, and engineers in particular are being put through the gauntlet when they interview.

Now Lauren, you wrote a story for WIRED this week about how the tech interview process has changed in light of these layoffs. Interviews have gotten absurd, but in a new way. What led you to this story?

Lauren Goode: I was starting to hear stories from tech workers and specifically engineers about how absurd, and that is the word that was used, these technical interviews we're getting. Engineers are in kind of a unique position because, as you've pointed out, they tend to be extremely well paid and that's usually right out the gate, right? It's one of those things where people know that if you get an engineering job and you land at the right place, you could be fresh-faced out of school and you're starting with a six-figure salary and maybe some options too.

But on the other hand, engineering interviews are interesting because they are so complex and technical. You are not only judged based on behavioral interviews or problem solving, but also, “Code this thing for me. Code it the way that I expect. Use this language and deliver it in this time frame.” And what I was hearing from engineers is that that part of the job interview is getting particularly demanding.

I spoke to one engineer who said that they received a take-home test that was going to require them to build an entire app in a short time frame and provide written documentation for how they built that app. Whereas in the past it might've been, “Here's a framework for an app. Build a feature that would work within this app.” I heard a similar story from another engineer who said that they were asked on the spot during a live coding test to build a to-do list app. Once again, not a feature, but build an entire app. I've heard that in some instances engineers have to study or prepare hours and hours. Or in one case someone said they had to come up with about a hundred pages of documentation just to sort of power themselves through the interview process. And then in other cases, it's just a multistage process with as many as six different interviews, in addition to a technical test that just make it really difficult to carve out the time to land the new job that you want or need. And so I decided to just dive into it.

Michael Calore: Right. So I mean, engineers have always had to take hairy tests like this, but these are just extra, extra hairy they sound like.

Lauren Goode: Things have gotten extra. That's a good way to describe it.

Paresh Dave: Are people actually completing them, or are they saying when they're in the middle of the interview, when they're asked this on the spot, “Peace. I'm out. I'm not dealing with this”?

Lauren Goode: Yeah, a lot of that is happening. The person I spoke to who said that they were asked to build an entire app in a short time frame said about halfway through the process, after a full day of coding and having not completed enough of the project said, “I think this is a sign. I'm withdrawing my application.” And that person has since shifted their job search to include smaller tech companies that they feel right off the bat could be a better cultural fit. And this is happening at big tech companies, but it's also happening across smaller tech companies as well, because as you said, Paresh, big tech companies now have the upper hand. Again, it's very clear that with all of these layoffs, there's a glut of talent in the market and employers now can be choosier.

On the startup side though, especially if they're lean and capital is hard to come by, one startup CEO told me that if she only gets 10 to 14 hires for engineering to basically keep their entire product running, she's going to be really choosy about who she hires, because that's a limited headcount. So it's happening on both ends of the spectrum.

Michael Calore: Is that why expectations are so high of candidates, because companies are being told to operate more leanly?

Lauren Goode: It's both that and it's a cultural shift. I spoke to Laszlo Bock who, Paresh, you might know from your years covering Google, was the SVP of people operations—aka hiring at Google—for about a decade. And he basically said this is a response to or an overcompensation for that idea of the coddled engineer, and particularly during the pandemic when people were able to work from home, maybe carve out a more flexible work schedule for themselves and there is encouragement in recent years to bring your whole self to work. And he said this is in some ways a direct backlash to that, that employers are saying like, “No, come to work. Come to the office and come ready to work and work hard.” And once again, that goes back to employers having the upper hand.

Paresh Dave: But do these interviews, is there proof from Laszlo or anyone that they actually lead to better engineers? Where's the evidence behind these crazy interview questions?

Lauren Goode: It's a really good question, and I wasn't able to uncover any evidence of that. What I did learn from talking to one source is that the bar for a technical interview has gotten measurably higher. I spoke to this woman named Aline Lerner. She is an engineer herself who now runs a company called Interviewing.io. And this is actually kind of an interesting company. They're an interview coaching platform for engineers. If you're an engineer seeking a job, you sign up, you pay $225 or more per interviewing session, and you get paired with a mock interviewer who doesn't know who you are, doesn't even see you because these are not done over video. They're done over audio. And this person administers a test to you, and you get to practice. And then they give you a score at the end. They're scoring you on all kinds of categories, but that includes your technical score.

What Aline told me is that over the past two years, Interviewing.io, with all the thousands of interviews they have data from, they believe that interviewing for a technical job has gotten 22 percent more difficult, which means it has gotten that much more difficult to just receive a thumbs up on the technical portion of the interview, because the mock interviewers are reflecting what is going on in the market. They're using a similar testing style or set of questions that, say, someone at Google or Meta would be using, and that it's just gotten that much harder.

Paresh Dave: And it's not that workers have gotten worse—

Lauren Goode: Worse.

Paresh Dave: … in some way.

Lauren Goode: Presumably, no. That is not the case.

Michael Calore: So one of the places that people are talking about this is on the app Blind, is that right?

Lauren Goode: Oh, good old Blind.

Michael Calore: Yeah. Tell everybody who maybe doesn't know what Blind is, what it is, and then tell us what the conversations are.

Lauren Goode: Blind is an anonymous app for workers. And as I said in the story, it's a place where the truth is elastic, but some clear trends emerge. If you're a journalist, you can be on Blind too. We could go and post about our own company if we wanted to. So people are coming from companies across all sectors on Blind, but it's a good place to check out where people are talking about the tech companies. And workers on Blind, engineers in particular, are talking about instances where this feels like the coding Olympics. Maybe that's a little bit hyperbolic, but just indicating that an interview process they'd been through was really difficult. They say, “I went through many rounds of interviews at Meta, and it turns out at the end of the day they didn't have a ‘team match’ for me,” meaning they didn't have a team to put them on. They didn't even actually have the headcount. So people have been anonymously complaining about this as well. And if you look hard enough, you start to see some pretty consistent patterns.

Paresh Dave: Do you think anything has changed with the nontechnical portion of interviews?

Lauren Goode: That I'm not aware of. And it's probably worth noting that Aline said that of the over 200,000 layoffs that have been tracked across the industry since 2022, that it's probably only tens of thousands of those jobs, she estimated 15,000, that were engineering jobs. So we know that the bulk of the layoffs have been across other job categories like middle managers. Meta has been laying off a lot of middle managers, marketing, admin, support roles. I don't know what those job interview processes are like, but I want to say just because of how many people it is, it's probably also challenging just to get your foot in the door at this point.

Michael Calore: Yeah. So at what point does an engineer show up for an interview at a tech company and an AI just conducts the whole interview and then decides whether or not they get the job?

Lauren Goode: Well, there is definitely AI screening happening at the point of application right now. In fact, one of my former colleagues, Hilke Schellmann, just wrote a whole book about this, and she's been on the book circuit talking about it. But I think what's interesting, at least for this particular story, is how job candidates are using AI. I found a couple of TikTok and YouTube videos, although like Paresh said, it's hard to know how many of these are staged just to illustrate a point and how many are real, where people, engineering candidates, are doing a live coding test over video and they're responding to questions based on what ChatGPT is spitting out for them because it happens so fast now. And those are both coding questions and something like the hiring manager saying, “Can you tell me if Java is single-threaded or multi-threaded?” And the person just, through a live transcript, has put that into ChatGPT and ChatGPT spits it out with an explanation of what that means and why.

And so yeah, it's pretty amusing to see. But one of the things that this could actually prompt, no pun intended, is for the interview process to change, if the interviews really have become sort of similar and hiring managers are asking the same sets of questions and people know they're going to get some of the same tests. You can prepare or ChatGPT your way into a completely rote interview, and then that's not really benefiting anyone. So all of these changes in the market could force, and one would hope, a slightly more creative and maybe more meaningful interviewing experience for workers.

Paresh Dave: Yeah. A fear of what we're seeing right now is just a pendulum swinging in the far direction on one side where it's these crazy questions, but we're going to come back slowly as they realize there's nothing to this and it's not leading to better hires.

Lauren Goode: Right. Right. And hopefully it doesn't swing so far in the other direction again, that we get the brain-teasers of like, “Tell me how many windows are on office buildings in Manhattan” without Googling.

Michael Calore: Without asking ChatGPT.

Lauren Goode: Whatever, those how many jelly beans are in the jar, right?

Paresh Dave: Piano repair people.

Lauren Goode: Exactly.

Michael Calore: All right, well thank you for an invigorating conversation about the tech job market of all things.

Lauren Goode: Sure. I don't feel super confident I will be hired as an ombudsman anytime soon.

Paresh Dave: Good luck with your barista applications, Michael.

Michael Calore: Thank you. Oat milk, sir? All right, let's take another quick break and we'll come right back with our recommendations.

[Break]

Michael Calore: All right, Paresh, as our guest, you get to go first. What is your recommendation for us?

Paresh Dave: Well, since we've been talking about jobs, I figured we'd talk about the workplace. My recommendation is, if you're aware of someone in your workplace who's disabled or has accessibility needs, maybe reach out to them in the next couple of weeks and ask whether you're collaborating with them in the way that they prefer the most. It could be something as simple as sharing presentations ahead of time before you present them over a Google Meet or Zoom or whatever, and allowing them time to either digest it so they can sort of focus on lip-reading maybe during a meeting, or they can prepare their questions ahead of time and send them electronically, whatever it is.

I bring this up because we often sort of overlook people's needs. I don't think this only applies to people with disabilities. I think you can reach out to all your coworkers and sort of say, “Are we collaborating in the best way possible? Are we really managing this relationship?” And this seems like a good time to check on that. And it is Black History Month, especially check in on your people of color colleagues and people who you just might not always interact with, but do occasionally, and sort of see how can we have a better working relationship.

Lauren Goode: That is an excellent recommendation.

Michael Calore: Yeah, it's very good advice for everyone.

Lauren Goode: Really thoughtful.

Paresh Dave: Yeah. I don't know if it's more practical or philosophical, but you can make it a little bit of both.

Lauren Goode: I mean, much better than Gilad’s sliced lemons.

Michael Calore: We do prefer the recommendations that straddle the line between practical and philosophical, so thank you for that. Lauren, what is your recommendation?

Lauren Goode: I was going to recommend a John McCarey podcast, which is not a podcast featuring the now late John McCarey, but a podcast with his biographer that was really good. I'm going to say that for another week for the John McCarey fans out there. I'm going to recommend a documentary that I recently watched called Eternal Memory. It was Oscar-nominated in 2023. It's, fair warning, very sad. It's about a couple facing Alzheimer's disease. One half of the couple has Alzheimer's, and his wife who's a little bit younger than him is trying to support him through it. The male character in it, Augusto, is really interesting because he was a journalist and he was kind of a force during the Chilean dictatorship in the '70s and '90s. Once traditional media was sort of taken over by the government, he was finding all of these ways to get the word out about what was happening. He was a really passionate journalist, and he is now the one who is suffering cognitive decline.

The documentary really gets inside their home. Part of it takes place during the pandemic and inside their lives and inside their relationship, which is very touching. So it's a little bit about personal memory and the decline of personal memory, but also about shared cultural memory in a way that I found to be really, really, just really touching. So I recommend checking that out if you are in the mood for a tear-jerker. I was watching it as part of another story I'm doing for WIRED, which will come out shortly.

Michael Calore: Awesome. Eternal Memory.

Lauren Goode: Eternal Memory. Yep, you can watch it. I watched it on Amazon Prime.

Michael Calore: OK, so it's like rentable?

Lauren Goode: It is rentable.

Michael Calore: OK.

Lauren Goode: Yep, it is. Mike, what's your recommendation?

Michael Calore: I'm back on my BS, as you would say. I'm going to recommend a piece of music, the new Ty Segall record.

Lauren Goode: Tell us about this.

Michael Calore: OK. Ty Segall, TY.

Lauren Goode: This is a nice palette cleanser, by the way, after Paresh and I both gave very serious recommendations.

Michael Calore: Mine is also very serious.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Michael Calore: Ty, T-Y, Segall, S-E-G-A-L-L. Look him up. He's a rock guy. He's a rock and roller. He plays guitar. He sings. His songs are a little bit on the heavy side, but they have a dash of sweetness and a very strong weird streak, which I love and appreciate. Ty is extremely prolific. He lives in Los Angeles. He used to live in San Francisco. He's from the same part of the world that I am in Southern California, so I've been following his career for a while. And this album just came out and he just launched a tour behind it. It's called Three Bells and it has sort of a new band playing with him on stage. I saw the show last night. It was the first stop here in SF. He's going all around the US and then he's going to Europe in the summer. So if you listen to it and you like it, check him out live, because my God, what a show. I was floored for an hour and a half. It was really amazing.

Yeah, lots and lots of guitar. So if you're a guitar person and you like your music to have a lot of good guitar playing in it, not show-offy guitar playing, but just good, powerful, emotionally charged guitar playing, then you should be listening to Ty Segall.

Paresh Dave: It sounds like a nice thing to listen to after a crazy job interview.

Michael Calore: Yes. Yes. Or to let off some steam if you perhaps maybe have recently lost your job or if you're fed up with the interview process. Yeah, it's very cathartic. Ty Segall, Three Bells, Drag City records. Double vinyl LP if you're a vinyl person. So yeah, check it out.

Lauren Goode: This is so on-brand. I really appreciate it.

Michael Calore: Bring earplugs. Absolutely bring ear plugs. Dude cranks those guitar amps and you'll feel it if you're anywhere within 50 feet of the stage. Bring ear plugs.

Lauren Goode: You said Ty grew up near you. Did he also surf Doho?

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Really?

Michael Calore: I'm sure. I mean, yeah, I'm sure. He's from South Orange County, so yeah, probably. He's way younger than me, but yeah, he probably surfed the same waves, rode the same waves growing up.

Paresh Dave: I didn't know you were from South Orange County.

Michael Calore: Yeah, I'm from Laguna, Dana Point.

Lauren Goode: He was on Laguna Beach. The show. You didn't know?

Michael Calore: I was not.

Paresh Dave: Your cliffs are fallen.

Michael Calore: Yes, unfortunately, that part of the world is suffering right now, so my heart goes out to all them brethren in the OC. All right, that's enough.

Lauren Goode: OK. That is our show. Paresh, thank you as always for joining us.

Paresh Dave: Appreciate it. I'll be sending some critical feedback in the coming weeks.

Michael Calore: I appreciate that and look forward to it. Say hello to your lovely dog, Kaazu, for us.

Paresh Dave: Of course.

Michael Calore: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can skit all of us on Blue Sky. Just check the show notes. Our producer is Boone Ashworth. We will be back with a new show next week. And until then, goodbye.

[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]

Michael Calore: And thanks to all of you for listening to the show. If you have feedbacks, you can—

[Everybody laughs]

Lauren Goode: I love those feedbacks.

Michael Calore: What is happening?

Lauren Goode: I love those sweet baby raised feedbacks.

Michael Calore: What is happening?

Lauren Goode: I don't know.

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